LITTLE ROCK, AR / February 24, 2012 – The Downtown Little Rock Community Development Corporation is pleased to announce that the UACDC’s proposal for the Pettaway Pocket Neighborhood is a Grand Award Winner in the 2012 residential architect design award program. With more than 800 submissions for RADA 2012 nationally, 40 projects including three grand award winners were selected for awards among a wide range of housing categories. The Pettaway Pocket Neighborhood won in the “On the Boards” category and was a Fall 2011 collaboration between UACDC staff and fifth year architecture students. Winning projects will appear in the May/June 2012 issue of residential architect magazine and will be exhibited at the American Institute of Architects Convention in Washington DC in June. RADA is the most comprehensive housing design awards program in the US.
An emerging model for urban neighborhood revitalization, the pocket neighborhood is an identifiable cluster of houses organized around shared outdoor commons and infrastructure─ideal for building a high-quality neighborhood within an affordable housing setting. The proposal provides niche urban market housing at construction costs of $100,000/unit, excluding site work. The pocket neighborhood capitalizes on smaller home footprints with shared amenities related to a community lawn, shared street, playground, and natural stormwater management infrastructure. A Low Impact Development (LID) stormwater treatment landscape eliminates use of underground pipes and catch basins, creating a 50 percent savings in infrastructure costs while solving for chronic flooding problems.
The Pettaway neighborhood is one among several distinct turn‐of‐the‐century urban neighborhoods comprising the Downtown Neighborhoods surrounding the Little Rock central business district. The Downtown Neighborhoods are unique historic areas in Little Rock and represent some of the most important phases in Little Rock’s history, from the boom era of the post‐Civil War years to the tumultuous school integration period of the late 1950s. Since the massive white flight from Little Rock to the suburbs in the 1960s, these neighborhoods have suffered from disinvestment and erosion in the diversity of their populations. With the return to downtown of younger populations mostly consisting of
creative class types in the arts, professional design, nonprofits, and higher education, these neighborhoods are ripe for reinvestment. A classic streetcar neighborhood with mixed uses, the Pettaway neighborhood is near the Clinton Presidential Library, the Clinton School of Public Service, Heifer International, the Arkansas Arts Center, Central Business District firms, the Capitol, the Federal Building and Federal Courthouses, the University of Arkansas Law School, Arkansas Children’s Hospital, the University of Arkansas Medical Sciences Center and St. Vincent Infirmary.
Planning for the Pettaway Pocket Neighborhood was commissioned by the Downtown Little Rock Community Development Center (Scott Grummer, exec. director) and in partial fulfillment of a planning grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and a grant from the City of Little Rock.
